Business Commons^™

The Enduring Ambivalence Of Corporate Law, Christopher M. Bruner

Scholarly Works

Prevailing theories of corporate law tend to rely heavily on strong claims regarding the corporate governance primacy and legitimacy of either the board or the shareholders, as the case may be. In this article I challenge the descriptive power of these theories as applied to widely held public corporations and advance an alternative, arguing that corporate law is, and will remain, deeply ambivalent - both doctrinally and morally - with respect to three fundamental and related issues: the locus of ultimate corporate governance authority, the intended beneficiaries of corporate production, and the relationship between corporate law and theachievement of the …

Shareholder Democracy On Trial: International Perspective On The Effectiveness Of Increased Shareholder Power, Lisa Fairfax

All Faculty Scholarship

Shareholder democracy - efforts to increase shareholder power within the corporation - appears to have come of age, both within the United States and abroad. In the past few years, U.S. shareholders have worked to strengthen their voice within the corporation by seeking to remove perceived impediments to their voting authority. These impediments include classified boards, the plurality standard for board elections, and the inability to nominate directors on the corporation's ballot. Shareholders' efforts have also extended to seeking a voice on the compensation of corporate officers and directors. Advocates of shareholder democracy believe that such efforts are critical to …

Making The Corporation Safe For Shareholder Democracy, Lisa Fairfax

All Faculty Scholarship

This article considers the effect that increased shareholder activism may have on non-shareholder corporate stakeholders such as employees and consumers. One of the most outspoken proponents of increased shareholder power has argued that such increased power could have negative repercussions for other corporate stakeholders because it would force directors to focus on profits without regard to other interests. This article critically examines that argument. The article acknowledges that increased shareholder power may benefit some stakeholders more than others, and may have some negative consequences. However, this article demonstrates that shareholders not only have interests that align with other stakeholders, but …

Governance In The Ruins, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

What gets an economy up and running after a catastrophic war or a period of oppressive rule? While there are nearly as many answers to these questions as experts, one of the most prominent for the past century has been law. Nearly every page of Law and Capitalism, a remarkable new book by Curtis Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor, stands in implicit or explicit dissent from the prevailing view. Milhaupt and Pistor’s countermodel begins a matrix consisting of two axes. The first contrasts a purely protective regime on one end, with a pervasively “coordinative” approach on the other. The second axis …

Hedge Funds In Corporate Governance And Corporate Control, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

Hedge funds have become critical players in both corporate governance and corporate control. In this article, we document and examine the nature of hedge fund activism, how and why it differs from activism by traditional institutional investors, and its implications for corporate governance and regulatory reform. We argue that hedge fund activism differs from activism by traditional institutions in several ways: it is directed at significant changes in individual companies (rather than small, systemic changes), it entails higher costs, and it is strategic and ex ante (rather than intermittent and ex post). The reasons for these differences may lie in …

Classified Boards And Firm Value, Michael D. Frakes

Faculty Scholarship

Classified boards constitute one of the most potent takeover defenses for U.S. firms today. However, as with takeover defenses more generally, economic theory offers an ambiguous prediction as to the effect that classified boards have on bottom-line firm value. A resolution of this ambiguity will require sound and convincing empirical methodology. In an effort to address limitations in the existing empirical literature, this article approaches the relationship between corporate governance and firm value while taking various measures to account for unobserved sources of heterogeneity across firms. Using the instrumental variables model developed by Hausman and Taylor, I find evidence of …

Legitimacy And Corporate Governance, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Parallels between corporate governance and state governance appear to be growing. This essay focuses on the suggestion that corporate governance is becoming structured much more like public government in certain ways. This shift may well be helpful for enhancing credibility and confidence in capital markets, but it also raises important questions. Will reforms enacted in the post-Enron era limit managers' discretion to innovate, take risks, and respond quickly to changing economic circumstances? How far should society go in imposing on corporations the kinds of procedures found commonly in democratic governments?

Good Faith, State Of Mind, And The Outer Boundaries Of Director Liability In Corporate Law, Christopher M. Bruner

Scholarly Works

The Delaware General Corporation Law was amended in 1986 to permit shareholder-approved exculpatory charter provisions shielding corporate directors from monetary liability for certain fiduciary duty breaches not including (among other things) breaches of the duty of loyalty and acts not in good faith. This article examines the development of corporate fiduciary duty doctrine in Delaware leading up to and following this statutory amendment, focusing particularly on the Delaware courts' evolving conception of the meaning anddoctrinal status of the good faith concept employed in recent cases to permit a non-exculpable cause ofaction for conscious nonfeasance.

The article argues that Delaware's good …

On The Nature Of Corporations, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Legal experts traditionally distinguish corporations from unincorporated business forms by focusing on corporate characteristics like limited shareholder liability, centralized management, perpetual life, and free transferability of shares. While such approaches have value, this essay argues that the nature of the corporation can be better understood by focusing on a fifth, often-overlooked, characteristic of corporations: their capacity to "lock in" equity investors' initial capital contributions by making it far more difficult for those investors to subsequently withdraw assets from the firm. Like a tar pit, a corporation is much easier for equity investors to get into, than to get out of. …

A New Player In The Boardroom: The Emergence Of The Independent Directors' Counsel, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the last thirty years, the independent directors have occasionally been represented by independent counsel. Instances include: special litigation committees reviewing derivative suits; independent committees in parent subsidiary mergers and MBOs; and internal investigations of misconduct. We predict that, with the additional legal requirements imposed on independent directors by the Sarbanes Oxley Act and related changes to SEC rules and Stock Exchange listing requirements, the independent directors, especially those on the Audit Committee, increasingly will be represented on a continuing basis by independent legal counsel. Out of this will emerge a new figure in the board room: the Independent Directors' …

Worker Ownership In Enron's Wake - Revisiting A Community Development Tactic, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

Worker ownership of business enterprise has long been touted as a vehicle for community economic development. Employee stock ownership plans in leveraged buy-outs, ESOPs and broad-based stock options in going concerns, and worker cooperatives in selected sectors - the experience has varied widely in goals, method, and outcome.

This Article reflects on the continued utility of worker ownership as a component of community development and calls attention to contrasts with conventional corporate governance and goals. Rather than an end in itself or just another way of doing business, worker ownership can be a vital element of a broader job creation, …

Corporate Constitutionalism: Antitakeover Charter Provisions As Pre-Commitment, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

Constitutions constitute a polity and create and entrench power. A corporate constitution - the governance choices incorporated in state law and the certificate of incorporation - resembles a political constitution. Delaware law allows parties to create corporations, to endow them with perpetual life, to assign rights and duties to "citizens" (directors and shareholders), to adopt a great variety of governance structures, and to entrench those choices. In this Article, we argue that the decision to endow directors with significant power over decisions whether and how to sell the company is a constitutional choice of governance structure. We then argue that …

The Very Uncertain Prospect Of 'Global' Convergence In Corporate Governance, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

Elites in the United States legal academy have been uniform in their prediction of "global" convergence on a single model of governance for large publicly held corporations. That model is, of course, the U.S. model. The evidence, though, is only of some trans Atlantic convergence with an outlier here or there. Moreover, the existing scholarship is culturally and economically insensitive. U.S. style corporate governance, with its requirements for truly independent directors who will confront and remove badly performing CEOs, and which has as an element lawsuits brought by activist shareholders, is simply inappropriate for many cultural settings. Post Confucian and …

Who Should Pay The Corporate Tax In A Flat Tax World?, Rebecca S. Rudnick

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article reviews the corporate tax system within the context of the historical bias and current effects of the current system of taxation of corporations and shareholders. Drawing on public finance theory, financial markets microstructure research, and perspectives on corporate governance, Professor Rudnick proposes a profits tax on the liquid equity of firms. She finds this to be a normative rationale for a double tax system under optimal tax principles due to the inelasticity of demand for and supply of liquidity and the economic rent it produces. The value of liquidity in different capital markets is the crucial determinate. Under …